The ad, signed by more than 100 classroom teachers, parents, noted
education advocates, and others, suggests the federal law is part of a
plan by President Bush "to privatize America's public schools," and
that it threatens thousands of schools with closure. The law, the ad
argues, encourages "lying about the facts" and "uses blacklists to
banish professionals, institutions, methods, and books."

Ken Goodman, a professor emeritus of language and literacy at the
University of Arizona in Tucson, took the lead in getting the ad placed
in the July 26 edition of the Globe. He raised $11,500 to pay
for it, accepting small contributions as well as $500 from a California
teacher and $2,000 from a group called the California Coalition for
Authentic Reform in Education.

Addressing John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democratic Party, the ad
declares, "Teachers need your support to save our schools from the
punitive law misleadingly labeled No Child Left Behind ... "

Sens. Kerry and Edwards, along with most other Democratic
congressional delegates here, voted for the No Child Left Behind Act in
2001. As candidates for the White House, both have suggested the law
needs some changes, but the ad calls for stronger medicine.

"Will the Democratic Party commit to getting rid of NCLB?" it
asks.

The ad quickly drew fire.

"It's outrageous," said Andrew J. Rotherham, the director of
education policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a
Washington-based think tank aligned with the centrist Democratic
Leadership Council. "There are legitimate criticisms of No Child Left
Behind, but that ad seems to go out of its way to avoid them."

Mr. Rotherham, a strong supporter of the law, described some of the
criticisms levied as "paranoid."

"We've been having difficulty getting through to the Kerry campaign
that NCLB and the attack on public education is an important issue,"
Mr. Goodman said. "We thought we'd try to get their attention with an
ad in the Boston Globe as the convention opens."

He added, "This [law] is a frontal attack on public education."

The ad aims some heavy blows at the law: "Passed by a bipartisan
vote, NCLB will close the majority of American elementary schools, or
will allow them to be taken over by the state or profit-making
businesses."

It also suggests that the law "drives students and teachers out of
schools and encourages lying about the facts," and "bases all
decision-making on test scores."

Mr. Goodman believes the presumptive Democratic nominee needs to
take a tough stand against the federal law. "Unless he takes a strong
position, he's going to lose a lot of votes from teachers and parents,"
he warned. "This is something that parents are angry about."

But Mr. Rotherham suggests that the ad's rhetoric may well undermine
its mission.

"Hysterical paranoia went out of style after the primaries, when
John Kerry [prevailed]," Mr. Rotherham said.

"Ads like this hurt the cause of people seeking changes in No Child
Left Behind, rather than help it," he added. "Your average person sees
an ad like that and is going to smell weirdness, not reasoned
debate."

—Erik W. Robelen

Former Teacher Vilsack Hones Speech for Prime Time

Boston

When she takes to the podium at the Democratic National Convention
for a prime time speech July 27, Iowa first lady Christie Vilsack will
be thinking of her 5th grade teacher.

When she was nervous about making a class presentation, her teacher
told her to practice by standing in her bedroom at home, while speaking
crisply to her parents, who were in the living room. The strategy
worked, and Ms. Vilsack has not been shy about public speaking
since.

Ms. Vilsack, a native of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, taught in public
schools in New York and Iowa for 18 years. She is married to Gov. Tom
Vilsack, the Democrat who was on Sen. John Kerry's short list for the
vice-presidential nomination. The first lady's endorsement of the
Massachusetts senator a week before the important Iowa caucuses helped
push Mr. Kerry out of the candidate pack and along the road to the
Democratic presidential nomination.

Ms. Vilsack told delegates at the National Education Association's
caucus on July 25 that she endorsed Mr. Kerry "because of the respect
that I think he pays teachers."

"It is important we get the respect that we deserve," she added.

She said she was impressed when she dined with Mr. Kerry and his
daughter Vanessa last winter, and the senator turned to his daughter to
include her views in the conversation. "That first impression brought
me to endorse him in the Iowa caucuses," she added.

In an interview outside the NEA's caucus meeting, Ms. Vilsack
mentioned proudly that she had just had her teacher certification
renewed, even though she now works in schools as a volunteer.

"I'm in a classroom several times a week," she said.

‘Main Street’

In her convention speech, she said she planned to talk about
"Midwestern values and the value of education."

"I live on Main Street in Mount Pleasant, the town where I grew up,"
she said.

Asked about how Iowa was coping with the federal No Child Left
Behind Act, Ms. Vilsack quickly said, "I don't think much of it. I
might think something of it if they funded it. The punitive aspects
concern me."

Ms. Vilsack's appearance before the NEA came one day before The
Boston Herald ran a front-page article raising questions about two
newspaper columns she had written in 1994 and 1996 for the Mt.
Pleasant News, when her husband was a state senator.

According to the Herald, the columns discussed the difficulty
Ms. Vilsack had with some American speech dialects, such as those of
Southerners, residents of New Jersey, and African-Americans.

"I am fascinated at the ways some African-Americans speak to each
other in an English I struggle to understand, then switch to standard
English when the situation requires," she wrote in one column,
according to the Herald.

The Herald news story called the columns "inflammatory" and
it suggested that Ms. Vilsack "seemed to be promoting English as the
nation's official language."

Ms. Vilsack could not be reached for comment after the Herald
story, but in an interview with The Des Moines Register on July
26, she said that the column was meant to poke fun at her own inability
to understand different dialects while promoting proper English.

"I'm pretty good about making fun of myself, and the inability to
understand someone is often my problem," Ms. Vilsack told the Des
Moines paper. "I was, in that column, really sort of self-deprecating,
making fun of myself."

"I have celebrated language, but also taught diversity and
tolerance," she added. "That's who I am."

—Mark Walsh

Education a Focus of Harvard Event

Cambridge, Mass.

When 15,000 reporters come to town for a major political convention,
all manner of organizations try to come up with events to keep them
occupied and draw attention during the daytime hours, when the
convention hall itself is pretty quiet.

While Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who will accept his party's
nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Boston this week,
is a Yale man, Harvard University still wanted to make its mark. Two of
its main events were a domestic policy forum and a foreign policy forum
at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

The domestic policy forum on July 26 centered on education, health
care, welfare, and economics. The event drew an audience of several
hundred, including Harvard students in summer session and young people
who were in town for the convention.

"There are enormous debates to be had about whether the [private
school] voucher system is right, about whether the war is right, about
what to do on Medicare," said Lawrence H. Summers, the president of
Harvard and the moderator of the forum. "But no countries have advanced
their national purposes without having been well- and competently
governed."

"Part of respecting your country is respecting your government,"
said Mr. Summers, who served as a secretary of the Treasury under
President Clinton.

Caroline M. Hoxby, an economics professor at Harvard who has written
widely about education, said that when it comes to improving the
nation's public schools, "we're past the easy answers and on to the
difficult ones."

"If we want to remain one of the richest nations on earth ... we
have to remain highly skilled," she added. But industries requiring
highly skilled employees are not going to stay in the United States if
they can't find the personnel to do the job.

"They don't have to locate in the U.S.," she said.

While spending on K-12 education has more than doubled since 1970,
when adjusted for inflation, "we have not improved achievement
dramatically in that time," she said.

"Slovenia spends less than a sixth what we do per pupil, and they
beat us flat in every international test," Ms. Hoxby said.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act "is going to have to be
revisited and refined," she said. Although she added that the
school-improvement law has at least two good things going for it: a
focus on low-achieving students and "a sense of urgency."

But the law's system of rewarding or penalizing schools based on
achievement is "crude" and "just needs to be fixed. I don't think it is
rocket science to fix it."

The law's provision allowing students attending schools labeled "in
need of improvement" to transfer to better public schools does not give
children in many urban communities a realistic opportunity to change
schools, she said.

"The goals of the legislation are good, but implementation is on the
sketchy side," Ms. Hoxby said.

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